1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to an apparatus and method for collecting and exploiting information. Such information may appear in a data stream so that each individual item of collected information can be later accessed separately. The information in question may be for instance audio data corresponding to a succession of musical titles, in which case the individual items of information would correspond to respective musical titles.
2. Description of Related Art including information disclosed under 37 CFR 1.97 and 1.98
With the arrival of digital recording techniques available at low cost in consumer electronics, it is now relatively simple to form personal music compilations on a storage medium such as a DVD (digital versatile disk), recordable CD (compact disc), mini disk, hard disk, etc. The compilation is usually constructed from various sources such as DVD and CD players connected to a PC type computer, music servers and radios, etc.
Typically, a person wishing to make a compilation would select favourite musical titles from these sources and combine them manually to form a chosen sequence of titles on a recordable medium which can then be exploited outside the computer system, for instance with MPEG 3 players or in uncompressed form.
Creating such compilations is time consuming, and the choice titles are normally limited by the sources available at the time of compilation, which usually amount to a personal or loaned collection of recordings and/or titles currently broadcast on the received radio stations. Even with the advent of music servers on the Internet such as “Napster” and “Gnutella” offering a myriad of music titles for downloading, it is not practical to browse through their plethoric lists arranged in alphabetical order. On the other hand, the search engines provided on these servers are only useful if the user knows exactly what to look for.
Thus, all these approaches are not amenable to inciting a user to explore styles of music titles outside his or her pre-established tastes, and thus tends to confine musical cultures.